Railways Blog

At last, the end of the Cheadle Hulme to Crewe blockade. For five long months I’ve endured the dreadful ‘Rail Replacement Bus’ which more than doubled the length of my daily commute.

Today the train was even on time. I got from my front door to my desk in just over twenty minutes.

Sadly it’s only for a six weeks. In July there’s the Stockport blockade, and it’s bloody buses again for another two months. Bah!

Can somebody explain to me why back in the 1980s they completely rebuilt the whole of Crewe in seven weeks flat, while Stockport, a station of less than half the complexity, will take nine?

Cold Spring Shops shows that while Americans can do big, Russians could do even bigger. But just how does that thing go round corners?

Electric Nose waxes lyrical about the merits of Rail Express, and reminds us to attend the DEMU showcase exhibition in two weeks time. It’s high time I attended this one, even though I’ve always found Burton on Trent an awkward place to get to.

I’m sure the plug for Rail Express has nothing to do with the plug for Electric Nose in the latest issue’s editorial from Gareth Bayer, which rips into the anti-internet attitude of the more established railway modelling magazines.

Both the editorials [of other magazines] direct fire at the Internet in general and specifically at those who contribute to Internet forums such as Yahoo! The feeling is that the ‘net is home to barely educated ‘extremists’ and ‘zealots’ who don’t care about commercial realities, bully those who have unbiased and reasonably opinions, and are generally just a whole bunch of rotters who don’t play fair.

He goes on to compare the critical stance taken by some ‘internet zealots’ with the line taken by other magazines where objective reviews take second place to protecting advertising revenue. One post on the Demodellers list has even compared them with the music press, hardly paragons of unbiased objectivity.

Freedom of speech on the Internet has changed all this, and the old guard don’t like it. But just like sections of the music industry, they’ll just have to adapt or die. It’s not the 1970s any more.

I paid a visit to my local model emporium, Waltons of Altrincham, this afternoon, and something was loitering in the display cabinet with intent to ambush my credit card. It’s Minitrix’s newly released Swiss Am840.

This is the only main line diesel in my fleet (the other is a tiny shunting tractor from Arnold). With the Swiss railway network 100% electrified, SBB has few diesels, and they’re not used for passenger or heavy freight work. It’s what Americans would call a ‘road switcher’, used for heavy shunting, local freights, and works trains.

The model has to be the best N gauge loco I’ve yet seen. Not only is the detail and paint finish superb, but the mechanism puts Kato to shame. It’s almost totally silent, and slows to a crawl even using my ancient Hammatt and Morgan “Duette” controller.

I wonder how long it will be before we see mass-market British outline N gauge models to this sort of standard?

I get a namecheck from Electric Nose, who’s talking DCCs and Ae8/8s. Magnificent beasts. It’s a pity I didn’t take more photos of them when they were in general service.

By the time of my most recent visit to Switzerland, only a single survivor was still working, on spoil trains for the Lötchberg base tunnel.

They will long continue to run in model form, by Roco in HO, and by Kato in N.

OMS: Marillion – Afraid of Sunlight

Just to show I have been doing some railway modelling this weekend, I’ve been working on buildings for the Wominseebahn. I’ve now completed the Kibri Schönried station building kit, which will be Wominsee station, replacing the inappropriate German model I’d been using. Although not an authentic BLS model, the prototype being a station on the metre-gauge Montreux Oberland Bahn, it looks the part, and is at least from the same region of the country. I’m now about 75% of the way though the first of two Kibri chalet style houses, both based on prototypes from the village of Lenk, also in the Bernese Oberland.

The sole rolling stock work I’ve done is to attach the missing buffer from the Kato Re6/6 I’d purchased at the Derby show, a job taking a whole 15 seconds. (It actually took longer to phone MG Sharp to ask them to send me a buffer than it took me to fit it)

From Boing Boing comes news of a terrible horror: Self-propelled swarming robot traffic cones.

The new road markers have been developed by Shane Farritor, a roboticist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in a bid to help reduce the $100 billion per year that the Department of Transportation estimates is lost to the US economy through accidents and delays caused by highway lane closures.

The self-propelled markers take the form of robotic three-wheeled bases for the brightly coloured barrels that are set out to demarcate road repair zones. Farritor says they can open and close traffic lanes faster and more safely than humans.

That’s what they want you to believe: they’re really a wave of attack from an alien life form; trying to strangle our lines of communication.

Perhaps they’re even early prototype versions of Daleks: the sink plungers of doom and the killer egg whisks will come later.

Another weekend, another train show. This time it was the Derby show.

I was a little disappointed in this years’ show, while still good it wasn’t quite as good as previous years. Perhaps it was because this year focussed on American outline modelling rather than continental European. It’s probably because I’ve never spent any time watching trains on the left hand side of the Atlantic that American layouts, however well modelled don’t really appeal to me. It’s also the two best American layouts, “Pueblo Falls” and “Bethany Wells” have appeared at many shows over the last couple of years, and I’ve seen both several times before.

For me, the best layout was the superbly modelled “Farkham”, an urban layout set in an industrial part of northern England in the 1990s, with some very good urban scenic modelling; the office block under construction, alongside decaying Victorian structures.

My credit card did not escape unscathed; M G Sharp were there, and so were the Kato SBB Re6/6s. I’d already bought one in the newer red livery, now it’s been released in the older dark green colour scheme (some of the real locos still carried this livery at the time of my last visit to Switzerland in 2003)

My journey suffered significant delays in both the outward and return journeys; outwards there was a 20 minute delay on the Virgin Trains connection from Chesterfield caused by a ‘fatality at Northallerton’. Coming back, I had a long wait at Sheffield because First Trans Pennine’s 158 had broken down somewhere (perhaps it died of shame from the horrid First ‘livery’?)